[In the following essay, Morton discusses the role of memory and nostalgia in the poetry contained in the Alice books.]

The afternoon of 4 July 1862, on which the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first told during a boat trip up the Thames, remained “golden” in Lewis Carroll's memory, although the weather is said to have been cool and wet.¹ Most importantly, it is nostalgically recalled in the three poems which Carroll attached to the Alice books. These are not parts of the stories, but they express an essential part of the meaning which his creations had for Carroll—an undercurrent of a certain kind of nostalgia. And though nostalgia does not seem to be of much importance in Alice's adventures—the original audience wanted “news of fairyland,”² not anything they had experienced already—the current of memory which comes to the surface in these poems is a vital part of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

The first version of the story, Alice's Adventures under Ground, was not meant to be published and is inscribed “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day.”³ For publication Carroll wrote a poem describing the boat trip in its first six stanzas and then concluding:

Alice! A childish story take,
          And with a gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined
          In Memory's mystic band,
Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers
          Pluck'd in a far-off land.(4)

This is not very specific, but it calls up more than a single afternoon: the mystic power of Memory, the loneliness of the pilgrim, the dreams of Childhood. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—of no importance in itself, “a childish story”—is to be a memorial of something important and to express a deep longing for the past.

In the second poem, at the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass, the boat trip is described again, the note of nostalgia sounded, and now both are explicitly associated with Carroll's sense of the fleetingness of his relation with Alice Liddell, no longer a little girl but well into adolescence when the second book was published in 1872:

No thought of me shall find a place
          In thy young life's hereafter—
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.
A tale begun in other days,
          When summer suns were glowing—
A simple chime, that served to time
          The rhythm of our rowing—
Whose echoes live in memory yet,
Though envious years would say “forget.”

(173)

As these verses show, a longing for the past is inextricably entwined with the feeling Carroll had for Alice. She and all the other “child-friends” will grow up almost as fast as Alice's dream-rushes fade away in Through the Looking-Glass; and knowing this, Carroll sees them and their setting in a nostalgic haze and tries to fix them in memory before they fade.

The same pattern of fixing experience in memory appears at the close of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice wakes up and, after telling her dream to her sister, goes home to tea. The sister goes through the dream again in reverie, then imagines a grown-up Alice remembering her dream and telling it to her children. In other words, Alice's adventures are framed in memory by being reinvoked not once but twice. The ending of Alice's Adventures under Ground is similar, but here the memory of the boating trip and Alice's dream are combined. Her sister falls asleep and dreams of “a boat with a merry party of children on board … and among them was another little Alice, who sat listening with bright eager eyes to a tale that was being told, and she listened for the words of the tale, and lo! it was the dream of her own little sister.” The book ends like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: she imagines an adult Alice retelling the dream to her children and “remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.”⁵

What Carroll does at the end of both books suggests the ending of Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey.” There the speaker addresses his sister and describes her in the future, remembering the present and thus saving her brother and his present moment of inspiration from oblivion. The adult Alice will tell her dream to her children, and perhaps Alice Liddell will read her story to her children and remember her odd but entertaining friend Mr. Dodgson. His almost bitter prophecy, “No thought of me shall find a place / In thy young life's hereafter,” will not be fulfilled. More generally, it seems that Carroll is like Wordsworth in believing that present feeling and the ability to call up past feeling may die and that he must therefore try to preserve and “enshrine” his experience. The golden afternoon is like one of Wordsworth's “spots of time,” an exceptional experience of illumination and unity, and it has to be enshrined in the Alice books and the three poems attached to them. (No doubt Carroll's photography expressed the same desire to preserve a present experienced as painfully fleeting.)

There is, of course, a vital distinction to be made between Wordsworth's view of childhood and Carroll's, as Peter Coveney points out. For Wordsworth childhood is part of growing up, and the child is father to the man. But for Carroll nostalgia for childhood is “a means of detachment and retreat from the adult world,” which leads to a “dreaming denial of the reality of life” in the poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass.⁶ The difference between Wordsworth's stern belief in growing up—in growing up at any cost, Carroll might have said—and Carroll's nostalgic withdrawal into childhood lies behind the wonderful parody of Wordsworth's great poem of “Resolution and Independence” in the White Knight's song. “Resolution and Independence” is about memory and about setting one's experience in a larger perspective of time, that of a whole life rather than of the immediate moment. Carroll reacts against this stern, adult morality by exposing Wordsworth's lack of humor. But at the same time he evokes a nostalgia which reveals his shared anxiety about memory. Thus the White Knight's song is given a retrospective frame, almost unique in Alice's stories: “Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through the Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday” (307). Listening to the song “in a half-dream,” she takes the scene in “like a picture.” Sung to the tune of “I give thee all, I can no more,” the song is lugubriously but touchingly wistful beneath the hilarity, and ends, appropriately enough, by recalling “That summer evening long ago” (313).

Carroll, then, has surrounded the two stories of Alice's adventures in a golden nostalgic haze—deliberately evoking the sense of the past in presenting them to his readers. Within the stories, however, longing for the past rarely appears: the introduction to the White Knight's song is an exceptional intrusion. (In Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, by contrast, the desire to return to childhood is continually enacted in the shifting back and forth among different levels of reality.) Alice is always “curious,” that is, eager to go forward and discover new things, not to go backwards and revisit the past. Nevertheless, memory and the past are important presences within the Alice stories. Exploring them reveals an important paradox. In the material surrounding Alice's stories memory is essentially pleasant, a means of possessing and preserving something desired—even though it is tinged with anxiety. But within the worlds that Alice visits the experience of memory is disturbing, even threatening. The characters whom Alice meets find their own memories vaguely distressing, and Alice discovers that her memory has gotten disconcertingly confused.

In keeping with this pattern, allusions within the stories to the boating trip take on a different tone, as if the sunset hue of the golden afternoon has darkened. The story of the pool of tears and the Caucus-race in Alice's Adventures points back to an earlier expedition spoiled by rain. In Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice finds herself rowing with the Sheep, there is something almost nightmarish in the transformation of the dark shop into a river with “tall riverbanks frowning over their heads” (256). Even the water has “something very queer” about it (254), so that Alice finds rowing frustrating. The dream-rushes which Alice picks are frustrating too, for “there was always a more lovely one that she couldn't reach” (257). Yet it becomes clear that the sadness of this gloomy river is really the narrator's, not Alice's, when he intrudes to ask reproachfully,

What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade, and to lose all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? Even real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while—and these, being dream-rushes, melted away almost like snow, as they lay in heaps at her feet—but Alice hardly noticed this, there were so many other curious things to think about.

(257)

The nympholeptic rushes belong to the narrator's dream, not to Alice's: perhaps the tears in which Alice nearly drowns are his too. The rushes appear again to add a nightmare touch to the final scene, when the candles at the dinner party grow “up to the ceiling, looking something like a bed of rushes with fire works at the top” (335).

When Alice plunges into Wonderland, following the White Rabbit, she is certainly not entering a timeless world. The Rabbit, afraid that he is late, is the victim of a time that is going too fast for him: what startles Alice into action and begins all her adventures is the sight of him taking a watch out of his waistcoat pocket (26). His panic about time is an appropriate introduction to Wonderland, even though most of the characters Alice will meet are not pressed for time as he is. The railway guard whose “time is worth a thousand pounds a minute” (217), the Red Queen, running furiously to get nowhere, and the Anglo-Saxon Messengers are exceptions. Most of the characters live at a leisurely pace, spending their time at games (croquet and chess), at meals, or in conversation. The Lion and the Unicorn stop their battle for refreshments, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee plan to stop theirs for dinner. But in these leisurely worlds things still can go wrong with time.

The “Mad Tea-Party” is a much-discussed example. Here the Mad Hatter seems to have realized the desire expressed in Carroll's nostalgia: for him, time has stopped in the late afternoon. But this has not brought him happiness: he is melancholy and irritable. He tells Alice that Time is a person and that one can be on good terms or bad terms with him. In other words, as Donald Rackin says, “Time is now like a person, a kind of ill-behaved child created by man, [and] there is the unavoidable danger that he will rebel and refuse to be consistent.”⁷ Elizabeth Sewell has argued that “the emphasis in the Alices is towards giving time a greater controllability, at the direction of the will”: for example, Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that with help she might have left off growing at seven (266), and the Red and White Queens talk grandly of “taking” several days or nights together (324). The Mad Hatter's “Time” belongs to this pattern too.⁸ But the desire to make time controllable, which certainly exists, expresses a hidden fear of the reality of time as something uncontrollable and impersonal. Only the imaginary control of neurotic withdrawal from the experience of time is possible: in the endless tea party, in the Queens' differing kinds of franticness, in Humpty Dumpty's sitting forever (so he thinks) on his wall watching time go by. James R. Kincaid presents Alice as an invader in Wonderland and at the tea party, disrupting “the comic joy with her linear perspective of finality.”⁹ But though Carroll rebelled against linear finality, in his books as in his life, he could not present the rebellion as joyful. Thus the Hatter is on bad terms with “Time,” who seems to be explainable as a paranoid fantasy, based on a misunderstanding of the Queen of Hearts' outburst, “He's murdering the time! Off with his head!” (99). Donald Rackin argues that at the tea party the concept of time is “laughed out of existence,”¹⁰ so that Alice in Wonderland is in a world without time. Certainly Wonderland is a sort of improvised world where strange things can happen, but time is still very much a presence. It can be laughed at, but Carroll knew, and his creatures seem to sense, that laughter cannot affect it.

Thus, the memory of past time is often distorted by strange anxieties, and most characters seem to be on bad terms with their own pasts. Many are willing, even eager, to tell Alice about their pasts, but what comes out is dreamlike and often nightmarish. The Mouse, for example, has his “tale” and the Mock Turtle his “history.” But the Mouse's tale turns out to be not straightforward fact but a poem about being condemned to death; it baffles and almost hypnotizes Alice, who visualizes it as a tail. As for the Mock Turtle, it seems that the Gryphon is right when he says that really he has no “history”: “it's all his fancy, that: he hasn't got no sorrow, you know” (126). What the Turtle does tell Alice is mysterious and elusive, dissolving into puns—“Laughing and Grief” (130)—like the Mock Turtle himself. At the mad tea party the Dormouse is badgered into telling about the three little girls at the bottom of the treacle-well, who draw “mousetraps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness” (103)—a suggestive combination. The story is absurd but fascinating, like the Mouse's “tail,” and Alice keeps wanting to hear more. The inquiry into the question, “Who Stole the Tarts?” is unlikely to arrive at a conclusion: the main item of evidence is the entirely baffling set of verses “They told me you had been to her” (158). Humpty Dumpty breaks off his poem about his visit to the fishes abruptly and tyrannically, as if to show his power over time—but time will end his life just as abruptly.

The White Knight's song, also autobiographical, is about an insignificant event completely misunderstood. It begins frankly enough: “I'll tell thee everything I can: / There's little to relate” (307). But the White Knight unwittingly reveals a part of himself by transforming the situation he describes into something quite different. The old man whom he meets sitting on the gate is a sly rogue with a fine sense of fantasy and an eye for the main chance: he wants to be tipped by the dotty old gentleman who is questioning him. The Knight is too much preoccupied with his inventions to notice this, and so the old man he remembers later is quite different:

And now, if e'er by chance I put
          My fingers into glue,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
          Into a left-hand shoe,
Or if I drop upon my toe
          A very heavy weight,
I weep, for it reminds me so
Of that old man I used to know—
Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow,
Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
Whose face was very like a crow,
With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,
Who seemed distracted with his woe,
Who rocked his body to and fro,
And muttered mumblingly and low,
As if his mouth were full of dough,
Who snorted like a buffalo—
That summer evening long ago,
          A-sitting on a gate.

(313)

Where does this figure, who does not resemble the shrewd old man presented earlier in the poem, come from? He does not occur in the earlier version of the parody “Upon the Lonely Moor” (1856).¹¹ He makes sense as a projection of the White Knight's melancholy and, in particular, of his experience of the past: in trying to remember, the White Knight produces an image of his inner self. The newly resurrected Wasp in a Wig, who was to have come just after the White Knight, also has an unhappy past. Old, his old age set off by the wasp newspaper and its “Latest News,” bitter, contrary, he shows the effects of time most painfully of all the characters: Alice gets him to tell his story in rhyme, and learns that when young he had been persuaded by “them” (unspecified) to shave off his “ringlets.”¹² These would not grow back, and now “they” perversely hoot at him for wearing a wig to hide his baldness. Perhaps the real reason why the Wasp was cut out was not Tenniel's difficulty in drawing him but the bitterness with which the Wasp shows the effects of age and repression (shaving off one's ringlets).

In short, what is produced in these excursions into the past is not clear and factual but dreamlike and unreal, usually in verse rather than prose, usually with a good deal of comic violence or comic grief. Thus, understandably, many of the characters are vague and absent-minded, as if they cannot bring themselves to remember the past. The jurors have to write down their names to be sure of remembering them until the end of the trial. The White King has to keep a memorandum book:

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”

“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don't make a memorandum of it.”

(189-90)

(Alice carries a memorandum book too but does not use it for records [268].) The White Queen has the gift of remembering both past and future, but her memory does not seem to be of much use to her: she is foolish and confused. Her famous rule, “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day” (247), seems to sum up the rather unsatisfactory terms she is on with Time. The White Knight is also absent-minded: constantly inventing useless things and guarding against possibilities which will never occur, he is oriented away from past and present toward an imaginary future:

“Now the cleverest thing of the sort that I ever did … was inventing a new pudding during the meat-course.”

“In time to have it cooked for the next course?” said Alice. “Well, that was quick work, certainly!”

“Well, not the next course,” the Knight said in a slow thoughtful tone: “no, certainly not for the next course.”

“Then it would have to be the next day. I suppose you wouldn't have two pudding-courses in one dinner?”

“Well, not the next day,” the Knight repeated as before: “not the next day. In fact,” he went on, holding his head down, and his voice getting lower and lower, “I don't believe that pudding ever was cooked! In fact, I don't believe that pudding ever will be cooked! And yet it was a very clever pudding to invent.”

(304-5)

The White Knight is rather helpless in relation to time: thus he must wait for his inventions to strike him when they will, like happy accidents. This suggests Carroll's statement about his writing, that “whenever or however it comes, it comes of itself. I cannot set invention going like a clock, by any voluntary winding up.”¹³ But Carroll was more cunning in his relations with time than the Knight. Phyllis Greenacre says, “He seemed always to be in some kind of battle with time, attempting to avoid being caught by time or trying to entrap time himself. He often refused invitations for a specific time but would announce his intention to come at a later, unspecified time.”¹⁴

There are other characters who are not absent-minded but are still forgetful. The Queen of Hearts somehow overlooks the fact that her executions are never carried out. The Red Queen bristles with facts and rules, all of them proof of the power of her memory. But she defines herself by this willed kind of memory, not by personal experience. In this she is similar to many other characters. The White Queen's rules, the White Knight's inventions, the Duchess's morals, the Gnat's puns, Humpty Dumpty's tyranny over language—in fact, everybody's comic pedantries—are all signs of an effort to replace experience and the personal past with something safer. They reveal a desire to forget and, underneath that, a lingering desire to remember.

The White Queen speaks for all these characters when she says to Alice, “I wish I could manage to be glad! … Only I never can remember the rule” (250). Trapped in her artificial memory, she has forgotten that being glad is not a matter of rules. Though Alice too takes rules very seriously, as Kathleen Blake shows,¹⁵ she does not live in a world of rules like the chess queens. When the Red Queen first appears, she asks Alice, “Where do you come from? … And where are you going?” (206), and at the end of the interview she says, “remember who you are!” (212). Similarly, when Alice bursts into tears, the White Queen implores her to “consider,” that is, to remember: “Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!” (250). With both queens, Carroll is making fun of the sense of a coherent past and future, based on memory, which is the foundation of a mature identity. Thus the Red Queen introduces Alice into the chess game, and both queens initiate her as Queen at the eighth square. When they ask her to “remember” and “consider,” they are asking her to see time in the adult way and so to be adult. But of course they are not really adults themselves, only elderly children: Carroll is ridiculing the process of growing up which will divide him from Alice.

Thus in Wonderland Alice's memory is confused because her identity with her past—and so with her future—has been suspended or postponed. She cannot remember her lessons correctly and her memorized poems come out as nonsense. Sometimes it seems that a malicious spirit has crept into her memory: forgetting herself she recalls her cat Dinah at the wrong moments, frightening the Mouse and the birds. Similarly, her memory replaces Isaac Watts's industrious bee with the lazy and predatory crocodile, and Southey's pious Father William with an unedifying old rascal. Moreover, she cannot remember who she is. That is, she can remember details of her past life and that of other little girls she knows, but she cannot remember which of the little girls she knows is herself. She may be Ada or Mabel—or Alice. As she says to the Caterpillar, “I can't explain myself. I'm afraid, Sir … because I'm not myself, you see” (67). The first two poems that Alice tries to recite¹⁶ in testing her memory are, like “Resolution and Independence,” about establishing a coherent identity through time, indeed through a whole life:

In-books, or work, or healthful play,
          Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day
          Some good account at last.

Isaac Watts, “Against Idleness and Mischief”

“In the days of my youth,” father William replied,
          “I remember'd that youth could not last;
I thought of the future, whatever I did,
          That I never might grieve for the past.”

Robert Southey, “The Old Man's Comforts, and How He Gained Them”

In getting them wrong Alice is for the moment escaping or rejecting this kind of identity. She has not “thought of the future” but gone down the rabbit hole “never once considering how in the world she was to get out again” (26). Similarly, the third and last of these tests of memory, “'Tis the voice of the lobster” (139-40), parodies Isaac Watts's “'Tis the voice of the sluggard,”¹⁷ whose moral is that one should spend time wisely, reading and improving one's mind. With Carroll's assistance, Alice's mind, especially her memory, rebels and refuses to be improved.

By contrast, when it comes to nursery rhymes, Alice's memory works very well: for example, the “old song” about Tweedledum and Tweedledee keeps “ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock” (230). Alice remembers them so well in fact that the rhymes, all in the past tense and ostensibly about past events, come alive before her, so that somehow she has gone backward in time. Alice can meet the celebrities of the nursery as living beings: perhaps this is a reward for her childish faith that the rhymes are true. But what becomes present to her is still fixed as if by the rhymes: it does not have the freedom of the present but is determined like clockwork or like a nightmare. Alice is in the position of someone who has gone back in a time machine but is helpless to change history. The tarts are stolen, the Crow comes, the Lion and the Unicorn are drummed out of town, and Humpty Dumpty falls forever. In all these cases Alice's memory makes her the witness of the calamities of the nursery-rhyme characters, and though she is not seriously affected or moved, there is a kind of silent reproach. These characters exist—like storytellers—to amuse children, but in order to amuse them they have to suffer, and in this sense their suffering is Alice's fault.

In the two fantasy worlds, then, memory is something essentially unpleasant—vaguely disturbing and baffling for Alice and an elusive, even painful enigma for the other characters. Why should this be so? Carroll suggests the answer in his repeated returns to the golden afternoon when the story was first told. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is, after all, a very unusual book not only in its content but also in the situation that produced it. Alice is not only the heroine of the story but also in a sense its inspiration and the most important member of its first audience. Of course the fictional Alice and Alice Liddell are not the same—but in the present context they can be identified. The fictional Alice was Alice Liddell for Carroll and for Alice Liddell as she listened to or read the stories: both must have seen, not the fair-haired girl whom Tenniel drew, but the dark beauty of Carroll's photographs. The Alice who follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole, half forgetting herself, is also the Alice who half forgets herself in listening to Carroll's story: Alice waking up from her dreams is also Alice leaving when the story is told, and leaving Carroll behind.

In the poem that introduces Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Carroll presents the telling of the story as something that was forced on him by the Liddell sisters, three stern little Fates:

Ah, cruel Three! In such an hour,
          Beneath such dreamy weather,
To beg a tale of breath too weak
          To stir the tiniest feather!
Yet what can one poor voice avail
          Against three tongues together?
Imperious Prima flashes forth
          Her edict “to begin it”:
In gentler tones Secunda hopes
          “There will be nonsense in it.”
While Tertia interrupts the tale
          Not more than once a minute.
And ever, as the story drained
          The wells of fancy dry,
And faintly strove that weary one
          To put the subject by,
“The rest next time—” “It is next time!”
          The happy voices cry.

(21, 23)

The first two stanzas suggest, not Wordsworth, but the mock-heroic style of The Rape of the Lock with undertones of malice and masochism. No doubt they reveal something of the truth about Carroll's feelings for Alice and her sisters. Perhaps he really would have preferred to be silent: after all he was being forced into an adult role, that of the avuncular storyteller, which would divide him from Alice and her sisters. But the role of the storyteller did have its advantages for Carroll as well, and it seems likely that he was willing to enjoy them. Alice Liddell later wrote that Carroll's reluctance was mostly a game:

Sometimes to tease us—and perhaps being really tired—Mr. Dodgson would stop suddenly and say, “And that's all till next time.” “Ah, but it is next time,” would be the exclamation from all three; and after some persuasion the story would start afresh. Another day, perhaps the story would begin in the boat, and Mr. Dodgson, in the middle of telling a thrilling adventure, would pretend to go fast asleep, to our great dismay.¹⁸

Carroll no doubt enjoyed teasing Alice, but as storyteller he has her attention and her affection. Many of the characters Alice meets look through her or over her but he has Alice's gaze, her “eager eye and willing ear” (345). As well, he has a sort of magic power over her: “the magic words shall hold thee fast” (174). And in his created world he can make her do what he chooses: dictate her thoughts and modify her memories and her identity.

For in this situation Alice Liddell's memory is both a tool Carroll must use and a threat to his power. He must refer to things she knows—cards, chessmen, mock turtle soup—but all these things are from her past and her family.¹⁹ They carry the sense of her real identity which could break his spell and bring her back from Wonderland to Oxford. The mournful Gnat seems to be conscious of this problem when it says to Alice:

“I suppose you don't want to lose your name?”

“No, indeed,” Alice said, a little anxiously.

“And yet I don't know,” the Gnat went on in a careless tone: “only think how convenient it would be if you could manage to go home without it! For instance, if the governess wanted to call you to your lessons, she would call out ‘Come here—,’ and there she would have to leave off, because there wouldn't be any name for her to call, and of course, you wouldn't have to go, you know.”

(224)

More generally, if Alice gives up her identity in real time she can escape governesses and growing up and instead go boating with Carroll. But the Gnat seems to know from the start that he will fail, that everything he has to offer is merely “looking glass,” and that Alice will never leave the real world for his:

“Crawling at your feet,” said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), “you may observe a Bread-and-butter-fly. Its wings are thin slices of bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.”

“And what does it live on?”

“Weak tea with cream in it.”

A new difficulty came into Alice's head. “Supposing it couldn't find any?” she suggested.

“Then it would die, of course.”

“But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.

“It always happens,” said the Gnat.

(223)

It is as if the Bread-and-butter-fly is a sort of invention, like one of the White Knight's, and like his inventions it does not work. Through the looking glass it seems that Alice can escape her old self and her past (“Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!” [185]). The mirror that normally confronts one with his identity and with the time in which that identity arose—that showed Carroll how much older he was than Alice—will dissolve and let her through. But the world he conjures up for her is, he knows, merely a reflected world, still always pointing back to her past and the beginning of her future.

This is part of the secret of memory within the Alice books: the fictional Alice is cut off from her memory because Carroll wants Alice Liddell to be cut off from hers and brought into a world he controls. Memory brings the knowledge of Time, the great enemy of lovers. But Carroll's own memory is a threat too. Besides the listener the storyteller himself must be under the spell of his story—in that creative state which the thought of the realities left behind on the boat trip would end. He has to forget the hopelessness and ludicrousness of his relation with Alice—to forget that she is the daughter not only of Memory but also of the Dean of Christ Church. He has also to overlook the qualities of the “little goose,” as the Sheep calls Alice (255). Little girls must make very frustrating love-objects, after all, and it is unlikely that Carroll can have borne his enslavement to them without some resentment. No doubt this was largely unconscious, though it comes to the surface ironically (“Ah, cruel Three!”) and in the words of many of his characters, who often exasperate the fictional Alice—no doubt to the delight of the real one, and no doubt to Carroll's satisfaction as well. The arrogance of many of the characters, especially the male ones, suggests the hurt and the pretense of self-sufficiency of a rejected lover, the pride fragile as an eggshell. When Humpty Dumpty claims that he will not know Alice if he sees her again, he is perhaps expressing something that Carroll felt without knowing it, the desire to be free of Alice and to forget her. As Humpty Dumpty says, “Your face is the same as everybody has” (276): why should Alice's be so important to Carroll? But it seems that Humpty Dumpty cannot get along without Alice, because he falls the minute she leaves him.

At a deeper level what has to be forgotten is that the love that inspires the Alice books is itself a disguised remembering. The nostalgic haze was there all along because the experience of 4 July 1862 was itself a recalling of something from Carroll's past. After the work of biographical writers with a psychoanalytical orientation such as Phyllis Greenacre and Jean Gattégno, few are likely to argue that Carroll loved Alice Liddell and the multitude of other little girls in his life simply for themselves. Carroll's love for his “child-friends” points to a fixation on some unresolved problem in his own early childhood. For the purposes of this essay there is no need to be specific about what it was: the essential point is simply that Carroll's mind and feelings were directed towards some past trauma. And there is no reason to suppose that this was a single event. It is more likely to have been a long series of unrecorded experiences—in effect Carroll's whole early experience of the world, and especially of his family. In this, women, his mother and probably his sisters, seem to have been far more important that men—so, at least, the Alice books seem to show. As has been pointed out before, the worlds Alice visits are dominated by women: the Queen of Hearts and the Red and White Queens, not to mention Alice herself. Male figures are usually weak and ineffectual, or doomed to some sort of downfall like Humpty Dumpty (who foolishly counts on the King's horses and men to save him). As well, all the real characters, the ones outside the dreams, are female: Alice, her sister, and her cats. (The rabbit, before it is the White Rabbit, is a sort of exception.) According to Greenacre, this female dominance shows Carroll's fixation on his early relations with his mother at “that period when the mother is nearly everything, good and bad, to the children of both sexes; and is the desired one for protection and nurture or the feared one whose anger or withdrawal is devastating.”²⁰ Gattégno points out the paradoxical difference between the picture one gets of Carroll's mother from biographical sources and Carroll's “serious” writing—loving and self-denying—and the picture to be constructed from the Alice books.²¹ This paradox mirrors the relation between nostalgia and the fear of memory that we have been exploring.

Memory is a threat within the Alice books because it could, if Carroll recalled his painful past experience, destroy the psychological balance on which Carroll's relations with Alice Liddell, and so with the fictional Alice, are based. When he is outside the stories writing the framing poems or the nostalgic close to Alice's Adventures, he can remember only what he wants to remember about the past, and it can be seen as pleasant and dreamlike, with the painful realities kept down. But down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass he is closer to the reality of his own childhood: he is looking through a child's eyes, even though speaking in an adult voice. The truth about his past is closer, and he defends himself from it by projecting his anxieties onto his “creatures.” Characters such as the Mad Hatter, the Mock Turtle, the Red Queen, and the White Knight are unhappy with time in their wonderfully varied ways because they are unknowingly suffering from Carroll's past. If they ever remembered what is bothering them they would vanish away like the Baker when he meets (or remembers?) the Boojum in The Hunting of the Snark. Their world, Carroll's inspiration, would vanish like a dream.

Carroll's relations with time to a great extent determined the structure of his narratives. In order to understand how, we must first explore the ambivalence of the worlds Alice finds herself in, especially as this affects Alice's character, which is after all the one thing that links everything else together. Then we can explore the important question of the endings and with it the relation between the two books. It is endings that make one most poignantly aware of time, and so the storyteller needs to create “the sense of an ending” in such a way that our return to real time is not too painful. And he does this not just for his audience but for himself: in Carroll's case the ending of the story is like the ending of his relations with Alice, and he does not want to say goodbye. For Carroll endings were difficult, in fact impossible: really to end would be to accept time, which Carroll could not do. He could not follow the King's sensible advice to “go on till you come to the end: then stop” (158).

The ambivalence in remembering, the strange juxtaposition of nostalgia and forgetfulness, points towards an ambivalence in what is remembered, which pervades the worlds of the books. Carroll and his characters seem to be remembering something that is both loved and feared—and lovable and fearful in an unpredictable and bewildering way. The love is real: that is why Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world are not unhappy or oppressive in spite of their darker elements. The characters are not exactly happy but they are not in pain, nor are they capable of serious malice or evil. There is a kind of childish exuberance in the Mock Turtle's Hamletizing or the Queen of Hearts' passion for slaughter that keeps either from being emotionally threatening for most readers. The landscapes the characters inhabit are somehow serene, even paradisal: paradise is present in the ability of animals, even cards and chess pieces, to speak. Yet this happiness, though pervasive, is also elusive. The characters cannot lay hold of it; neither can Alice, though she never stops trying till the end.

The deepest memory of the Alice books, then, seems to be of a love which is confusingly unpredictable, that comes and goes bewilderingly. “Wonderland” suggests not so much a child's delighted wonder as the sense of bewilderment caused by this love, the teasing contrariness and inconsequence that runs through the two fantasy worlds—affecting both physical objects, which can change unpredictably, and the psychology of the characters. “We're all mad here,” the Cheshire Cat tells Alice, and helpfully explains:

“To begin with … a dog's not mad. You grant that?”

“I suppose so,” said Alice.

“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.”

(89)

This is not a very good argument but it makes explicit the emotional ambivalence of the Cheshire Cat—which pervades the two worlds Alice visits: the Cat's disconcerting grin is to be expected anywhere, perhaps because it is contained in the demure irony of the narrative voice.

Thus, Wonderland logic is almost systematically illogical and contrary. Logic, after all, is in practice a kind of memory: it requires one to remember premises long enough to get a valid conclusion from them. The creatures mimic this process nicely but never actually follow it; they live in worlds of non sequiturs. In such worlds an ordered memory and a continuing identity would be impossible. Over and over again, Alice explores the logic of a Wonderland or Looking-Glass situation, arrives at some logical impasse and has to move on, in frustration, and since she is Alice, in hope. But the illogic of the trial and the banquet are too much: Alice wakes up, leaving Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world behind.

Though Alice opposes a stern common sense to the illogic of the creatures, she is beginning to absorb a kind of Wonderland doubleness into herself. We are told that “this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people” (33), so that in her thoughts she takes “first one side and then the other … making quite a conversation of it altogether” (59). Carroll's brilliant dialogue is becoming the medium of her thoughts: this is an expression of the creative duplicity of Carroll's relations with Alice Liddell, as (with her approval) he puts his thoughts into her mind. In Through the Looking-Glass Alice is beginning to display a kind of emotional inconsequence as well:

“Oh, you wicked wicked little thing!” cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace.

(176)

This is like the Cheshire Cat: Alice is growling when she is pleased. The tone is that of Carroll's letters to his child-friends, which show, in Greenacre's words, a “fluctuating aggressiveness with an urge to cruelty and then to affectionate playfulness.”²² Sylvie treats Bruno in the same way, kissing him to “punish” him, and so making the kiss into an assertion of power. Alice's behavior is not very different from the Duchess's treatment of her little boy or the Queen of Hearts' beheadings. Reward and punishment are illogical and unpredictable. W. H. Auden stated persuasively that “according to Lewis Carroll, what a child desires before anything else is that the world in which he finds himself should make sense”—especially in regard to the “commands and prohibitions” of adults.²³ But here Alice is treating the kitten as she has been treated in Wonderland, with the same teasing inconsequence. If the kitten were a child, it might well grow up with a Wonderland sense of logic, or with Bruno's crippled seductiveness. But cats cannot say yes or no, a fact which Alice regrets (341), and so are safe from logic and inconsequence.

During the stories, Alice is the object of the narrator's and the reader's affection, though not without an undercurrent of criticism,²⁴ while anger and fear are focused on other characters, notably the three Queens. But at the end of the stories, for an almost invisible moment Alice becomes the object of fear, the annihilating Boojum who makes everyone vanish away. During the stories the narrator can to some extent possess Alice—identify himself with her, and on the boat trip, persuade her to identify herself with him. Alice functions as a mediating figure between Carroll and the mother hidden in memory, comprising elements of both. To some extent she is Carroll himself, expressing his sense of what it was like to be a child. And she is also a Victorian little mother, like Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (though “curious” in a very different way), always wiser and nicer than the characters she meets and ready to take care of them. But for that moment at the end of each story she is the terrible mother withdrawing her love. Her evidence at the Wonderland trial, “you're nothing but a pack of cards!” (161) is far more powerful than the Queen's “Off with his head!”: it destroys a whole world. It turns out that what was on trial was Wonderland itself—that is, Carroll and his attempt to steal away the hearts of Alice and her sisters. Alice's awakening is the end of the story and the breaking of the spell of half-unreal love that has united Alice and her Scheherazade. But this ending is contained within the text, for there follows the passage describing Alice's retelling of the story and her sister's redreaming of it. With the ending of a story, time resumes its power—but Carroll tries to prevent this by putting one version of the ending into the narrative, trying to make it into something the narrative contains and controls. He is not prepared simply to make an end—to let Alice go.

Perhaps for this reason, Through the Looking-Glass follows. It is sadder and more nostalgic than the earlier book, because it is an attempt to remember what it meant, to call back its inspiration. Alice Liddell is no longer a child; the beloved Alice is only in the past. Carroll's sense of the passage of time is expressed through the only Wonderland characters who reappear, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, now Haigha and Hatta. It is appropriate that they should be the ones to return: it is as if arrested in time at the mad tea party they cannot even leave time and must continue. But now, instead of moving at a leisurely pace around the tea table they are breathless messengers, always in a hurry, and in someone else's hurry at that. That they are now “Anglo-Saxon” shows how far and how strangely the sunny day of Wonderland has receded into the past. (In “Jabberwocky” part of the meaning of the fake Anglo-Saxon is that Anglo-Saxon is a strange language and yet it is English, our language: it symbolizes a past which seems utterly alien and yet still belongs to Carroll, the repressed world of his earliest experiences.) The Messengers are like Carroll himself: they are arrested in time and yet have become ancient in having left unimaginably far behind the only time that makes sense for them. Alice does not recognize the Messengers—though Carroll had hoped that she would remember the Wonderland dream and tell it to her children. The Messengers do not recognize her and have no message to bring from Wonderland. Any such message would raise the question of the relations between the two Alice books and thus the question of Carroll's relations with Alice and with time.

The ending of Through the Looking-Glass is quite different from that of Alice's Adventures. Its beginning presents us with an Alice only six months older but in a new role. Dinah has had kittens, and Alice is playing at mothering them, instead of being mothered by her sister. In a mock-maternal way she proposes to punish the black kitten—for the offense of not folding its arms properly in order to be the Red Queen in chess—by putting it through the looking glass. Here we see the confusion of rewards and punishments again: kittens do not even have arms, and it soon becomes clear that going through the looking glass is not a punishment but something Alice wants for herself. For Alice is tiring of her unreal adult role: it is Dinah who is the real mother after all. And going through the looking glass will be to go back to the time before self-consciousness, before the self seen from outside that mirrors give us. Thus Alice goes through the glass, shrinks in size, and becomes a pawn, even a kitten in a sense: she replaces the White Queen's Pawn, whom the White Queen calls “my imperial kitten” (187). But again Alice wants to grow up—to become a Queen. At her banquet she finds she does not like the role and turns on the Red Queen, “whom she considered as the cause of all the mischief” (336). She shakes the Red Queen into a kitten—the black kitten—as she wakes up herself. But she cannot really shake off the Red Queen, because the Queen is in her, not the kitten: the Queen is the desire to dominate and to punish, which began the whole dream and caused all the mischief. This desire is also the desire to grow up and be adult, as Carroll sees it.

Alice is growing up whether she likes it or not, and whether Carroll likes it or not. She is becoming a woman. And the moral of that is that there is no escape from time. Carroll would have liked his art to be like the Outlandish Watch in Sylvie and Bruno, which makes time move backwards as its hands are moved backwards. But no such invention is possible. Again, Carroll shows a fascination with games—pastimes which are also ways of shaping time and giving it a meaning. But time cannot be controlled by the rules of a game, for as Kathleen Blake points out, every game needs a “stop rule” to guarantee a conclusion,²⁵ and time can have no such rule.

At the end of Through the Looking-Glass Alice and Carroll glimpse but cannot really accept the relentless passage of time. As a result Alice is left in doubt about the reality of her experience and wonders, “Which dreamt it?”—herself or the Red King? The reader is left with this question in the last sentence. For Alice it is only part of her playful teasing of the black kitten—but it is serious for Carroll. He is split between two selves or two times, which are “half a life asunder” (173). His child self is represented by Alice. His adult self—the real adult self that never came to the surface in Carroll, that might have dealt with the Red Queen—is represented by the sleeping King. Each, we are told, dreams of the other, but they never communicate. Because Carroll is divided between the two times, he belongs to neither: he has neither youth nor age and so is outside of life, which seems unreal and dreamlike.

Through the Looking-Glass ends with a question and so does the final poem, which asks, “Life, what is it but a dream?” (345). But to end with a question is not to end at all, to leave everything in suspense, to refuse to accept the only terms time offers. Thus, in the final poem Carroll presents himself as lost and purposeless without Alice. She is gone: the poem is not addressed to her, and Carroll laments her loss and her haunting of him like a ghost. The boat trip is recalled once again, but the sunlit river which symbolized an escape from time is now time itself. Down it the child-friends always drift away, leaving Carroll, apparently on the shore or motionless in the stream, with nothing but his sense that life is a dream.

The poem at the beginning of Sylvie and Bruno takes up this question again:

Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.
Man's little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.(26)

This does give an answer and provide a sort of ending: but the silent end of death is outside of life and time, as the silence at the end of a story is outside the story. An ending that could also be a beginning, coming to a conclusion inside time, seems to be impossible for Carroll. Similarly, in “An Easter Greeting to Every Child Who Loves ‘Alice,’” Carroll encourages Alice's little readers to look forward hopefully, almost longingly, to death.²⁷

There could, in theory, have been a third Alice book, and the preface to Sylvie and Bruno suggests that Carroll considered one.²⁸ For there is no obvious way to bring the Alice books to a definitive end: the Alice formula does not seem to include a stop rule. Marriage is the traditional ending for comic works, but Carroll could hardly give Alice away, or let her grow up. She could not be reunited with a lost parent, as in the fairy plot of Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, because leaving “them” behind is an essential part of the formula. And Alice could not go the way of Little Nell; it is inconceivable, given the tone of the books. Most importantly, nothing that happens in a dream is final: the only stop rule in dreaming is waking up. Dreams can, of course, be visions and produce a sense of revelation, but not the kind of dream Alice has: for Carroll, dreaming is escaping. The pattern of an escape from time by going down a rabbit hole or through a looking glass into a dream liberated Carroll's imagination but it also trapped him because within this pattern he could not use his imagination to deal with the realities of time. Thus, the Alice books are essentially unfinished: there is and could be no Alice Concluded. To conclude Alice would have meant letting go of her and of what she represents and beginning life in time without her. Carroll could not or would not do this, and so in the poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass he presents himself as haunted by an eternal, inescapable Alice outside of time:

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

(345)

Notes

1. For the different accounts of the boat trip see Derek Hudson, Lewis Carroll: An Illustrated Biography, new illus. ed. (London: Constable, 1976), pp. 112-16.

2. Lewis Carroll, “Alice on the Stage,” in Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 283.

3. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures under Ground: A Facsimile of the Original Lewis Carroll Manuscript (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1964).

4. The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), p. 23. References given in the text are to this edition.

5. Alice's Adventures under Ground, pp. 89-90.

6. The Image of Childhood, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 241, 247.

7. “Alice's Journey to the End of Night,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 320.

8. The Field of Nonsense (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), pp. 89-90.

9. “Alice's Invasion of Wonderland,” PMLA, 88 (1973), 97.

10. Rackin, p. 320.

11. The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, Modern Library (New York: Random House, n.d.), pp. 813-15.

12. Lewis Carroll, The Wasp in a Wig (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 34-35.

13. Carroll, “Alice on the Stage,” p. 282.

14. Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives (New York: International Universities Press, 1955), p. 168.

15. Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 108-48.

16. Reprinted in The Annotated Alice, pp. 38-39, n. 4; p. 69, n. 2.

17. Ibid., p. 139, n. 6.

18. Quoted in The Annotated Alice, pp. 21-22, n. 1.

19. William Empson points out the social meaning of many of the props in the Alice books: they assure Alice that she has not left the well-to-do world to which she belongs (Some Versions of Pastoral [Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938], pp. 278-80).

20. Greenacre, p. 221.

21. Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking-Glass, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Crowell, 1976), pp. 179-80. For a psychologist's discussion of Carroll in the context of literary paedophilia, see Morris Fraser, The Death of Narcissus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1976).

22. Greenacre, p. 181.

23. “Today's ‘Wonder-World’ Needs Alice,” in Aspects of Alice, ed. Robert Phillips (London: Gollancz, 1972), p. 11.

24. Kincaid explores the implicit criticism of Alice and her determination to be adult in “Alice's Invasion of Wonderland,” cited above.

25. Blake, pp. 92-93.

26. Complete Works, p. 275.

27. Printed at the end in Macmillan editions of the Alice books.

28. Complete Works, pp. 279-80.